Weird Science finds bottomonium “particularly attractive”

The pain of getting dumped, getting dumped by wasps painlessly, an open-flavor …

I suppose this means there must be an uponium, too: Somewhere along my development into someone who pretends to know physics, I became aware that a particle formed from one of the heavier than usual quarks had an odd name. The pairing of a charm and its less charming anti-charm has been given the name "charmonium." What I'd neglected to appreciate is the fact that this naming convention is generic. Any quark paired with its antiquark falls under the heading of "quarkonium," which has rather unfortunate consequences when applied to the bottom quark, as seen in the opening sentences of a preprint physics paper: "Heavy quarkonium spectroscopy (the study of heavy quark-antiquark bound states, such as bottomonium (b/anti-b)) has long been regarded as an ideal laboratory for the investigation of the interaction which governs the structure of quarkonia, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Bottomonium is particularly attractive because of the very rich array of bound states below the open-flavor threshold."

I have no idea what an "open-flavor threshold" might involve, but I will undoubtedly remember the "bottomonium is particularly attractive" bit.

This probably shouldn't have made it past the Institutional Review Board: IRBs exist to protect potential research subjects from experiments that might be harmful or a general waste of time. It seemed they weren't paying attention when these experiments came up for review, given the experiments involved "having people who recently experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected" while stuffed inside an MRI tube. Further condemnation for the approach comes from the findings: several areas of the brain that are involved in processing physical pain became active when dealing with the emotional hangover of being dumped.

Does this mean the Dover school board was pondering life's brief candle?: Alternately, death is the problem, and Carl Sagan is the answer. Have an undergrad ponder death and, suddenly, anything they learned in intro to bio doesn't look so hot; they'll feel less inclined to accept evolution (or want to hear about it from Richard Dawkins), and more prone to find intelligent design appealing. The same held true in a random population recruited over the Internet. This didn't hold true for students in a natural sciences program, though.

The authors went on to show that it was possible to reverse this effect with a dose of Sagan (an experiment controlled with what the authors termed a "no Sagan" group). Have people read a passage from Carl Sagan in which he celebrates the wonder of the natural world, and the appeal of intelligent design faded into the background.

Well, these things really aren't working out as planned: Some appropriately weird, counterintuitive results from the world of medicine. You know those automated, motion-sensitive taps that keep you from having to grab on to handles that are teeming with the bacteria of the last person to use the sink? Apparently, bacteria may grow better in the water inside them than they do in standard faucets.

There's unfortunate news for cancer patients, too. Those who have testicular cancer may opt to preserve more surrounding tissue, but typically get screened more regularly for recurrence. Unfortunately, that screening involves CAT scans, which deliver a large dose of radiation to the subject. It really shouldn't be a surprise, then, that secondary tumors are more common in those who receive extensive screening.

Getting the drop on ants: Or, more precisely, giving them the drop. Wasps, when faced with competition for food from their less aerial relatives, the ants, apparently have a simple solution: pick the ant up, fly off for a bit, and then drop them. The ants are apparently unharmed by this, but presumably require a bit of time to make their way back to the food supply.

If I'm ever reincarnated, I hope it's not as a weddell seal: The behavior itself seemed a bit weird when it was first reported: killer whales, hunting in pods, attempt to create a wave sufficiently large to wash seals off any ice floes they're lounging on. Now, it turns out that they don't do this to just any seals, but have one species they seem to find especially tasty. "These killer whales would identify and then attack Weddell seals almost exclusively, even though they made up only about 15 percent of the available seal population," said one of the NOAA researchers behind the work.

I'd link to the abstract, but the journal that published it, Marine Mammal Research, doesn't let non-subscribers even see its table of contents.